Obviously, people are going to either hate or appreciate foie gras. Probably after this article, more people are going to hate it because of the process of having a feeding tube shoved down a duck's throat. What did the duck deserve to have that happen? There should be another way to have the liver enlarged rather than the feeding tube. Wait, who am I kidding? The other ways might be just as inhumane. I'm not an extreme animal lover, but this is taking it a little far to be able to eat a fatty liver. It doesn't even sound appealing to me...

For those of you, ingorant people, I will explain!
The life of a duck consists of living on a farm for two months where the animal walks around freely. Besides eating special nutrition it can also have everything that nature provides. In fact most of the time, 9 out of 12 months, the ducks are living outside like normal animals. Then at the end they are force fed for 10 days. Anyone familiar with grain diets would know that they are very healty. For example christian have doing these for centuries, and for 10 day, but for a month before Christmass. It purifies you body!!!
In contrast to ducks: Chickens for example are not forcefed, however, they never ever see the sun for 40 days, they live in their own feces, and they have a radius of 1 meter to move around. Because have no choice, they are forcefed in way. Plus special lighting and addtional oxigen are applied to further enchance their apetite. So at the end their bodies are far from healty and full of toxins.
The same applied to the mass production of beef and pigs...... yet noone cares because they have much stronger lobbies!!!
Think about it!

Both sides of the debate, then, are right. Foie-gras production can be a form of abuse but is not necessarily so, for an enlarged liver can still be healthy. The question is, how do you draw the line?

How is healthy or unhealthy in any way related to abuse? why would a healthy liver not necessarily mean that the bird was abused? IMO force feeding somebody to point where they can no longer move around as nature intended them to and then killing them for personal palatable pleasure is a form of abuse no matter how healthy that somebody is after the process (in this case the carcas)!

This is just another feeble study that does not prove anything, except trick the week minded into thinking that it is ok to torture animals for food.

Both sides of the debate, then, are right. Foie-gras production can be a form of abuse but is not necessarily so, for an enlarged liver can still be healthy. The question is, how do you draw the line?

How is being healthy or unhealthy in anyway related to abuse? IMO any act of forcing something down somebody's throat against their will, making them unnaturally obese to the point that they cannot walk, fly or do other movements that are natural to them is abuse!
As Kath Rogers said, if you go to any foie gras farm you will see the many birds that did not survive the process of force feeding!

The tubes being shoved down the throats of the geese is just one of the issues when it comes to foie gras. The process involves expanding the livers to over ten times their normal size. That process can lead to hemorrhaging and slow, painful death.

The tubing process shouldn't be completely discounted either though. It's not a gentle process. The throats of the geese can actually be torn when the tube is shoved in. At that point, the lack of a gag reflex is irrelevant.

The neurobiology is there. Veterinarians, pathologists, and aviary experts have all testified that the process causes needless suffering.

Foie gras is not only unhealthy but also horribly inhumane. Ducks raised for foie gras struggle to breathe and walk. In every foie gras farm, there are trash barrels full of dead ducks that could not withstand the painful process of having their livers expand to over ten times their normal size.

"Foie gras" translates to "fat liver" and is nearly all composed of fat. Livers are supposed to cleanse toxins from the body, but the cruel force feeding process causes the ducks' livers to become diseased.

If you care about your health or animal welfare, you should not eat foie gras (diseased liver).

"The healthier, the better" - you pinpointed the focus of that research project, pspSJDwi9K. Its focus was on the relative health of livers with a view to producing 'healthier foie-gras' for the consumer, not because of some ethical considerations about the force-feeding of the animals, as the article's title and text suggest.
Regardless of how one stands on this issue, 'healthy' and 'foie-gras' make a strange combination in the same sentence.

The more tortuous an argument, the less convincing it usually is.
What have these test results about a healthy vs. and unhealthy enlarged liver got to do with whether the animals are abused or not during the process of force-feeding? You don't have to be an animal rights-activist to see that giving 'an extra helping', as the writer puts it, is not the same as being brutally overfed through a tube stuck down your neck.